1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to personal information management applications, and more particularly, to a system that generates an electronic notice that displays a portion of a day out of office notice.
2. Description of Background
Out of office features in existing applications such as Lotus Notes, IBM Workplace, and Microsoft Outlook all implement a way to take a number of days off from one day to many days. Yet, none of these applications contain the feature of letting a person take a half-day or in more general terms, x days and x hours off.
When creating an out of office notification in Lotus Notes and the user wishes to take a half day off, the user enters the start date and the return date. Then the user manipulates around the existing implementation by setting the notification to out for a half a day in the subject line or the body of the notification in order to attempt to notify others of their partial absence day. The only way the user can get the notifications for out of office to fire off during a fraction of a day with current implementations is to physically turn off (disable) the application after half a day or turn it on (enable) the application part way through the day.
Thus, there is a need to allow a user the ability to be able to generate an out of office notification that will distribute out of office notification to senders for only a limited number of hours (a partial day).